Out of all the cold war history, this is what I’ve researched least and honestly I’m left kind of perplexed. What drove the Khmer rouge? Was it a force for evil or was it just really stupid with a good heart? They did things like abolish money, which alone is incredibly interesting. The more I look into it the more it looks like this disaster was the result of mainly sino Soviet split, as over 90% of the foreign aid to the khmer rouge was from China with USSR backed Vietnam eventually stepping in. Then after Vietnam steps in and attempts to set up a worker’s state, China prevents them from being recognized at the UN, which set the people’s republic up for disaster from it’s inception, never being recognized then falling like a decade later.
I absolutely need to do a deep dive on the sino Soviet split, it seems for that period Chinese foreign policy was awful. The USSR was revisionist as fuck, yeah, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the US, Mujahideen, and khmer rouge. I feel like I MUST be missing something here. Did the USSR force China into these stances?
China tended to have really bad foreign policy following the split. They started viewing the USSR and by extension Vietnam as really large threats, and this was reflected in their Cambodia stance. They didn’t want another pro-soviet country in their vicinity.
As for Cambodia itself, North Vietnamese troops actually trained Khmer Rouge soldiers before they took power, so perhaps even they thought at first that they were comitted to the socialist path. Nevertheless, Vietnam liberated them later on.